August 14, 2025 • 37 mins
In this episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden interviews Dr. Torkil Faero, an expert in heart rate variability and stress management. They discuss Dr. Faero's journey from traditional medicine to focusing on holistic health, the importance of lifestyle choices in longevity, and the role of technology in monitoring health. The conversation covers various topics including insulin resistance, the impact of alcohol on recovery, individualized nutrition, the benefits of fasting, and the significance of sun exposure for overall health.
For Audience
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Takeaways
· Dr. Torkil Faero transitioned from traditional medicine to focus on heart rate variability and stress management.
· Lifestyle choices significantly impact longevity and health outcomes.
· Insulin resistance is a hidden risk factor for many individuals, regardless of their outward appearance.
· Wearable technology can provide valuable insights into health metrics and stress levels.
· Alcohol consumption negatively affects sleep quality and recovery.
· Eating patterns, such as meal frequency, can influence metabolic stress.
· Fasting can have beneficial effects on health and gut function.
· Breathwork and meditation can help manage stress, but individual responses may vary.
· Sun exposure is crucial for health, influencing hormone production and overall well-being.
· Personalized nutrition is essential for optimizing health and managing individual sensitivities.
Chapters
00:00 Journey to Heart Rate Variability and Health
07:56 The Impact of Lifestyle on Health
14:21 Wearable Technology and Health Monitoring
19:46 Nutrition, Fasting, and Metabolic Health
26:04 Breathwork, Meditation, and Stress Management
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:27):
Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
I'm your host, Dr.
Jeffrey Gladden.
And as always, we're here answering the big questions.
How good can you be?
How do you make 100 a new 30?
How do we live well beyond 120?
How do we live young for a lifetime?
And how do we develop a 300 year old mind?
And today I'm being joined by a physician, an emergency room physician, Dr.
(00:50):
Torkil Faero that's spelled T-O-R-K-I-L.
His last name is F-A-E-R-O.
And he's going to be coming to us from Norway, actually.
And he's very, very intrigued by heart rate variability, stress.
He's written a book on this that's become a bestseller and translated into a number ofdifferent languages.
(01:11):
And this becomes a very interesting conversation where we, talk about HRV, but we alsobranch out into lots of different permutations with regards to stress and health and ways
to counteract it.
And it's a really nice exchange of ideas.
think you're really going to enjoy this podcast.
Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
(01:34):
I'm your host, Dr.
Jeffrey Gladden, and I'm here with Torkil Faero who's Dr.
Torkil Faero, who's coming to us from the West coast of Northern Norway.
Right?
Is that, I get that right?
Yeah.
Okay.
I once got up to Bergen, which I thought was a long ways up there.
He said he's further North than that.
So I don't know.
(01:55):
He's somewhere up in the Arctic circle.
It almost sounds like we're starting to bump into it anyway.
ah
Well, welcome to the show, Dr.
Thank you Dr.
Jeffrey.
Nice to be here.
yeah, excellent.
So tell us a little bit about em your journey into being focused on heart rate variabilityand stress and things like that.
(02:17):
m You didn't start off that way.
Of course, you were probably trained like most of us in more traditional ah forms ofmedicine, if you will.
But how did you navigate to that?
How did you migrate to that?
It's a bit of a long story, but I'm trained as a normal physician and knowing about allthe diseases, I still make my livelihood from treating patients the way that I'm expected
(02:43):
to be as a normal doctor.
But some 12 years ago, my father died at 73 and I was took a look at myself in the mirror.
I could see I started to look like my patients.
Mm-hmm.
And I started looking around to see how can I be more healthy so I can reach an age farbeyond 73.
(03:05):
And I understood that there was so much knowledge about this.
And I understood I had to change my life totally around starting exercising, starting tofocus on sleep, nutrition, know, stress management and all of these things that we never
learned much about in medical school.
So I kind of had to start.
my own private medical study 2.0 by myself in my free time.
(03:31):
And somewhere along here, I understood that the autonomic nervous system is such a vitalpart of staying healthy and that we now have heart rate variability as a measure of the
state of this autonomic nervous system.
So I just got intrigued by that.
For a couple of years, I used an ECG based monitor strapped to my chest.
(03:54):
until I realized that we actually have this biometric in the watches that almost, at leastin Norway, almost everybody already uses.
And so I just dove into that and wrote the book called The Pulse Cure, which has beentranslated into nine languages, just been a continuing bestseller in Norway and has
(04:17):
completely changed my life around from being a normal one-to-one doctor to becoming a
public speaker and the bestselling author and everything that comes with that.
So, I'm still absolutely using the numbers and results I get from my Garmin watch, from myAura Ring, from my Wootband.
(04:40):
To guide my under these stressful circumstances, keep my head above water and still beproductive and keeping my health.
that's yeah, that's great.
So let me ask you this when you were uh when you were young, were you uh an athlete?
I kind of have this image that everybody in Norway is either cross country skiing or doingsomething.
(05:04):
So.
Yes, I was.
So I uh actually was on the national team in kayaking, in canoeing, maybe it's called inthe States.
uh Also doing of course, cross country skiing and other sports as well.
uh for like five years, was, uh you know, athlete training every single day, being all theway focused on that.
(05:29):
And that made it kind of strange that I just let myself
I don't know for like many years, not doing any exercise or taking any care about my ownhealth.
When did you step away from exercise?
Do you think?
I just, when I understood that I'm not going to be a world champion or come in theOlympics, I just quit.
(05:52):
I just focused my attention anywhere else.
was doing, because I've been, I've been traveling.
So I've been mainly focused on traveling, doing adventures, both alone and with my family,traveling around the world.
We have been sailing halfway around the world for years.
So my focus was on that.
I didn't really care about my own health through the medical study.
(06:13):
I didn't.
have much...
I think we thought that if I did everything right, I may live four or five years longer.
May.
Maybe.
And of course, doing that would require sleeping more, exercising a lot, uh doing thecooking from a lot more cooking.
(06:38):
And that would take four to five years.
during a lifetime to do that.
So I thought that, you know, the gains are not much more than the effort.
So why bother?
You may not even get that reward at the end.
But now, of course, studying these subjects, I understand that you can have a couple ofdecades more.
(07:01):
And now that I've been a doctor for 26 years, I can also see that in the patients that ifyou do most of the things wrong,
then you'd be lucky to get into your seventies.
If you do everything right, you have a fair chance of reaching your nineties and stillbeing vital and having a good life.
(07:24):
So that's what I'm aiming for.
And that's what I'm trying to help people understand themselves.
And of course, now that we have these watches, we have hard drive variability to guide us.
It's so much easier to manage, to be able to...
judge how the sleep quality is, the nutrition quality, if we are actually resting when wethought we were, and these kinds of things.
(07:48):
So I think that's part of the success in Norway that has been helping people towardstaking control of their own health.
So tell me about your dad.
Your father passed away at a fairly young age, at 73 I believe you said.
What caught up to him?
Was that lifestyle choice?
Did he end up with a disease or what?
(08:10):
so he got cancer, gallbladder cancer, which is like most cancers that we now know relatedto our lifestyles.
In my medical school, we were taught that it was genetic or just pure accident.
And now, of course, we know that the lifestyle has so much to say.
(08:30):
And my father just had a normal lifestyle.
didn't exercise too much, you know, the indoor life that most people have these days.
know Americans live indoors, you know, 95 % of the time.
He was probably sleeping and eating normally, but it's now normal to get these kinds ofdiseases.
So it wasn't, it wasn't directly unhealthy in any way, but he wasn't healthy either, youknow, with a, with, you know, know, 30 pounds overweight or so, and I was 40 pounds
(09:01):
overweight.
So a normal standard European, Western, US way of life is not healthy.
So you have to take more effort, put some more effort into it than that.
You know, one of the big one of the big drivers of of aging and also cancer risk isinsulin resistance.
(09:24):
And um as you know, when people are carrying extra weight around, um they have a muchhigher chance of being insulin resistant.
In the clinic over here, we're basically doing two hour glucose tolerance tests withinsulin curves on everybody that comes through.
um And the reason is because we found that so many people um
(09:46):
that have a hemoglobin A1c in the US terms of, 5.2 or 5.3 or something like that.
And fasting blood sugar of, you know, 90 or 93 or whatever.
When we stress them with 75 grams of glucose, it's just remarkable what happens.
Like their fasting insulin could even be five, let's say.
(10:07):
Ideally, we'd like it at two, but let's say it's five.
Their blood sugar might go up to 185 at one hour.
Their insulin might go up to
70, which it shouldn't go up more than say five times.
So if it's five, maybe 25 would be considered normal.
We'd like to keep that one hour number less than 130, 135.
(10:29):
And so people who are not obese, maybe carry a little bit of abdominal fat.
and exercise on a regular basis can still have significant insulin resistance when they'reeating or exposed to sugar, so to speak.
it's really, uh it's fairly insidious is my point.
(10:51):
There are the people that are obviously not the picture of health.
And then even in people that are the picture of health, so to speak, or close to it,there's kind of hidden risks there as well.
So it is interesting.
that I think we need to be a lot more vigilant in terms of how we care for the people.
(11:13):
Another thing we do is measure all the toxic burden in individuals.
We just had a 38-year-old woman here who was diagnosed with breast cancer on an MRI scanthat she got.
She just went out and got a full body MRI scan, found stage one breast cancer, three youngchildren, 38 years old.
um Why does she get that?
No genetic predisposition, no family history.
(11:35):
She's full of mold.
my gosh, full of toxins, environmental toxins.
And so it's really, um, if you're listening to this, the point is that, um, even thoughyou're exercising, eating well, things like that, there are other levels of this that need
to be looked at.
Like, what is your metabolic status?
Do you have insulin resistance?
What is the toxic burden?
(11:56):
What's the quality of the air and the water that you're breathing?
Things like that, because that stuff can, um, can really sneak up on any of us quitehonestly.
So.
Yeah, anyway, just to highlight that maybe data and some.
yeah, my father was of course advised to eat fat free diet.
(12:16):
You know, that was the advice from us doctors.
And I took a test myself and I found that I was pre-diabetic and used a CGM then and thenmanaged to, yeah, and managed to change what I was eating and how I was eating the
sequence of what I'm eating and so on.
(12:39):
So now I have a good ACA you won't see, absolutely.
And it's interesting also with the breast cancer that even if you have the BRCA1 gene,then if you're sleeping enough, you avoid getting the cancer.
If you don't sleep enough, for example, the chances of contracting a breast cancer is uhlarger with the same genetic background.
(13:03):
Yeah, I think that's really good insight.
know, the bracket gene, really the problem with it is it's a diminished ability to repairyour DNA is kind of what it boils down to.
And so most of the repair processes in the body occurred during slow wave sleep, deepsleep.
And to your point, you can, even if you have genetic predispositions that you know of orfamily history, ensuring that you get good quality sleep, which is back to your comments
(13:29):
about the wearables can help give you some insight.
So, you know, when you were talking about the whoop, the aura ring and the garment, you'reactually wearing the audience can't see us, but he's wearing all three of these.
Right.
So he's he's kind of a walking billboard for um for wearables, if you will.
I'm just curious, what's the correlation that you find between wearing all three of them?
(13:49):
Do you find that they uh contradict each other or correlate quite well?
They correlate well, they may stress different kinds of metrics in their reports.
So they would show your health from a little different standpoint, so to speak.
They would have some pros and cons.
(14:12):
I would say Garmin is by far the best when it comes to micromanaging your stress levels,you know, hour by hour, minute by minute, if you want that.
Mm-hmm.
more precise.
It probably has kind of a bigger engine, so to speak.
While the Auraring would be smaller, easier for many people who would not like a screen,who may just need to change their lifestyle a bit.
(14:40):
It would be better in regarding sleep, for example.
While the Bootpad would be better when you're writing a morning report every morning.
or you don't write it, but you check some different things you have been doing the daybefore.
And you will get a weekly and monthly report.
And I think that whoop is probably better when it comes to artificial intelligence andcollecting data and conveying that data to the person.
(15:09):
So they will all be different.
So I've been using maybe 10 or 15 different variables and I keep sticking to these three.
uh
Nice.
Garmin being by far the best one and also of course use them because to show that I'maffiliated with one of them and that I'm not have my integrity so to speak.
(15:33):
Sure.
Right.
So, you know, there are a number of things that we've noticed with the wearables.
And one is that if you drink alcohol, it really has an impact on sleep quality and slowwave sleep.
Of course, I think a lot of people feel like they will drink alcohol to relax and thatthey'll get sleepy and fall asleep.
(15:54):
The interesting thing is that, of course, and you know this from from wearing it andseeing patients, I'm sure that it really disrupts sleep in a big way, which
gets back to this idea of repair and recovery, right?
And one of the things I enjoyed about the whoop when I was wearing it was that therecovery score would give me an idea of not only the strain score when I was out mountain
(16:16):
biking or something, but it would give me the recovery score, which I would then utilizeto give myself an idea of what level of exercise I should engage in on this particular
day.
Is this a day to go all out or is it a day to kind of do a recovery kind of protocol?
I think there's a lot of wisdom in that too, because I think people can get focused on, umI'm going to exercise every day and they're trying to hit a personal record almost every
(16:41):
day.
And it's really counterproductive.
I think it's really about trying to match your exercise intensity to the quality of yourrecovery.
And if you kind of marry those two up, then that becomes a sustainable kind of way toexercise.
Absolutely.
And when I was training, you know, for the national team, we were going all in every day,you know, to the maximum every day.
(17:05):
And of course, now we know that it's when you recover that you build yourself stronger.
So if you push yourself to the max every day, you're just, you know, wearing yourselfdown.
You're not allowing your body to build itself stronger.
And this is why whoop and whoop has this, as you say, you can measure the strain and youwill see how recovered you are.
And if these, you know,
(17:27):
metrics are matching.
I think particularly also for women with their menstrual cycle, when they see that theweek before menstruation, they have so much less physiological power to do the exercise.
So I think particularly for those uh women is really, really important because it comes asa surprise, just as the surprise with alcohol that it really, because
(17:56):
I used to drink two glasses of wine every day, believing it used to be the doctor'sadvice, right?
And I even felt calmer.
So even after a busy shift at the ER, would, before I went to bed, I would have twoglasses of wine to, to wind down thinking it was useful, right?
And according to whoop, you know, that, that collects the data from the users, alcohol isthe worst dresser of all.
(18:23):
And I don't think I've met.
anyone starting to use a variable that has not cut down on their alcohol consumption.
we don't really, we're really poor at judging the consequences of the different things wedo.
We're not equipped to do that, but the heart rate will demonstrate just like the needle onyour speedometer, the intensity that is put upon you or you put upon yourself or from
(18:53):
from mold or alcohol or other factors.
Yeah, I think, I think that's a really wise statement that you just made, which is that,um, you know, we can be well intended, but, um, we don't really understand the
consequences of what we're doing, even if we think we're doing something healthy, likeexercise, like getting sunlight, like, um, having a glass of wine, like, you know,
(19:16):
whatever it might be, even eating certain foods, you know, are not healthy for everyindividual, right?
It's really.
It's about getting the foods that are right for your system, right?
Right for your gut, your bio, your immune system, these kinds of things, right?
So if you're listening to this, it really does become a custom fit and you want to havethe ability to tease that out.
(19:38):
You know, what is it that you're doing to optimize your ah autonomic nervous system?
I'm making sure I sleep enough.
That's number one, that I get those seven to eight hours of high quality sleep.
That will often mean, by the way, that I stop eating maybe four hours before I go to bed.
(20:01):
That is what also most people find.
And then I'm having a restricted feeding window, maybe six to eight hours.
And the rest of the time I don't eat.
I've cut alcohol.
more or less totally.
think I drink maybe 10 drinks a year just to reconfirm that I shouldn't do it.
(20:22):
I exercise, been running today, uh running maybe three times a week, also doing somestrength training.
I ran the New York marathon last year and the only training with light training, I onlytrain for 30 minutes in the zone two, twice a week, just to see if
(20:44):
Can I run a marathon with that background?
And I hadn't run earlier, so I was training for a year for that.
I'm making sure that I have a good stress balance that I'm able to calm myself down withbreath work mostly.
Can also do with a cold shower, cold exposure.
(21:06):
I also use a lot, of course, mostly during the winter.
Yeah.
And with nutrition, I stay away from food with chili that I react very, very strongly to.
had no idea before I started with the variables.
I also tolerate milk and gluten poorly.
What's that?
(21:28):
Chili, chili.
Yeah.
Like chili peppers.
That they put in everything without noticing because there's people are not allergic toit.
So they don't have to put it on the allergy list.
So you have to ask, you know, and as long as I eat it in the, if I eat it for lunch, it'sokay.
(21:49):
But if I eat it for dinner, it will ruin my night almost as bad as alcohol.
Interesting, interesting.
Yeah, that's very, that's very interesting.
The beauty of this is that if you're wearing these is you get lots of insight.
And when you start to combine it with a CGM and you can watch what your glucose is doing,that's a, that's a really powerful combination.
(22:10):
Uh, I think so, even if you're not diabetic, I would almost encourage everybody listeningto get a CGM and wear it for six weeks or eight weeks.
You'll learn so much about which foods and in which sequence you eat them.
what the impact is on your blood sugar.
And unfortunately, we don't have a CGM that can actually measure insulin.
(22:33):
I wish we did because the insulin really goes unnoticed.
And we've seen people that control their blood sugars beautifully with a two-hour glucosetolerance test, but my gosh, their insulin levels go super high.
And so it's another form of milder insulin resistance, if you will.
So there's just a ton of information there if we can.
(22:54):
if we can get that.
Yeah.
And then you, for example, you find that pizza is like the worst of all, when you getthose curves after a late night pizza, that will go for like seven hours bouncing up and
down.
And then you can also see on your wearable monitor that your stress levels follow thatsequence quite a lot.
(23:15):
right.
Yeah.
One of the insights that I had a while ago was that, um, you know, we think of, well,there was some interesting data in a study that basically showed that people that eat one
meal a day, uh, versus people that eat three meals a day or two meals a day, they had an80 % increase, risk of cardiovascular events and death if they one meal a day.
(23:35):
And the question was, why is that if intermittent fasting is good, why would, why wouldn'tone meal a day be good?
Cause I've gone to
meetings, and people will sort of almost braggadociously say, you know, I only eat onemeal a day.
It's like, really?
Okay.
So, um, but I think what you're highlighting and, what we sort of figured out as well isthat eating is actually stressful.
(24:00):
It's metabolically stressful.
We think it's a sort of, you know, regenerative or even rejuvenating, uh, restorative, butin many respects, it's actually very stressful.
And particularly if you get the wrong foods, the chili peppers, the gluten, the, know, uh,dairy things like that.
So if we're going to, when we're counseling people to eat, if they're going to eat in asix hour, eight hour window, whatever they want to do, we have them eat four or five meals
(24:27):
in that, in that space so that they're never getting that big metabolic load, allowingtheir body to adapt to it.
Uh, and, and, um, anyway, that's, that's one thing that we've kind of adopted over hereanyway.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
And so many people, struggle with symptoms from their intestines.
They have pain, bloating.
(24:48):
And when they get that long time without the eating, a lot of them get better.
That's right.
Yeah.
We've become big fans of the five day fast mimicking diet in that, in that regard to kindof reset the gut.
So.
m
then you can see on your wearable that it's actually relaxing for your system.
(25:10):
For many people at least.
And we used to think that...
And that was a surprise to me the first time I skipped breakfast, I was, you know, feelinghungry, expecting to see stress on my monitor.
I saw just calm.
Yeah.
So when you're fasting, you get these both calm and adrenaline.
(25:31):
So it's an interesting also to watch what happens to your body and to be able to monitorit.
Yeah, that is interesting.
um One of the things I've started doing recently is taking spermidine uh in the morningwhen I'm fasting because spermidine as you know, well, actually spermidine is a beautiful
molecule in that it addresses almost every hallmark of aging on some level.
(25:54):
But of course it really uh enhances autophagy.
And so if you're going to be fasting and you're going to be standing on the AMPK side ofthe
MTOR AMPK teeter totter, which is, you know, the regenerative side, the restorative side.
We're dropping in spermidine on that side of it to kind of enhance that as well.
So you can start to, what's that?
(26:18):
Too bad it's so expensive.
Yeah, well, uh getting sick is expensive.
That's thing, that's expensive.
I know, I know.
And you can also, as you're fasting, when you exercise while fasting, you can increaseyour autophagy as well.
That's another way you can do it.
That's right.
I take spermadine again, then go exercise.
So yeah, all good.
(26:40):
Yeah, very interesting.
So it sounds like you've developed some breath work practices.
Do you do any actual meditation per se?
you tapped into that or is it predominantly breath work or how are you?
breath work.
I think I'm kind of a meditative person.
I don't have a stress problem.
So I don't feel the need often to do so much meditation.
(27:06):
For me, it's often enough just to watch nature, to be outside walking, to go running.
But for people who are stressed, know, and many people are, you know, emotionallystressed.
then I know it's a good way to calm down.
And what's interesting also when you have the wearable, particularly the Garmin, then whenyou can see how your heart rate reacts.
(27:30):
So for many people, when they are meditating, they actually become more stressed, whichdoes not mean that they shouldn't do it, but maybe they really need to do it, you know,
when it's so stressful for them.
But at least it's interesting to know that what you did that you thought you could checkout as calming down.
was not calm.
(27:51):
It actually stressed you in some way.
a good point.
That's a good point.
you're, um if you're trying to meditate and you're kind of caught in this space of, umdon't think I'm doing it right, but I'm trying, you know, that can be stressful, of
course, right?
Meditation is really um more about simply being present and not being attached toanything, um outcomes or whatever else, right?
(28:16):
So it's really, it's kind of almost like, only a sacred space ah in many respects, butit's also just a very
quiet, calm, sort of stepping out of the flow of life going by kind of space, which isultimately very calming if you can get there, but trying to get there, I suppose, can be
stressful.
We use a device here called BrainTap.
(28:36):
I'm not sure if you've heard of that, but it's uh
it's a kind of muse.
I use the muse too, which is kind of neurofeedback.
yeah.
Muses neurofeedback.
This is actually utilizing a binaural beats uh with either music or just binaural beats inconjunction with photo bio modulation.
So you have lights coming through your eyes and through the blood vessels in the ears.
(28:59):
And you can actually pick which way form you want to go into.
So you can go to theta, which is a deep meditation.
You can put yourself in alpha.
You can go to gamma for flow.
You can put yourself in Delta to help you fall asleep.
We find that it, uh, that it's a very healthy tool for people.
here also where we measure vagal nerve power on everybody that comes into the clinic,every time they come in, we can actually measure the power, inside the autonomic nervous
(29:26):
system and the higher power you have.
What's that?
We do it with a, it's a, it's a computerized program that runs, uh, along with the braintap.
It's called neuro check and, uh
It's a few thousand dollars for the computer, but you just put clips on somebody's wristand they sit there for five minutes and you uh get a lot of things that are read out.
(29:49):
uh But one of the things is uh you can look at the, not only the balance inside theautonomic nervous system, but you can look at the power.
And what we find is that the people that have more power in the autonomic nervous systemare able to control their state much better.
So um we have people that come in.
Uh, normal power would be like, let's say 2,500 to 4,500 within the units that are beingmeasured.
(30:15):
And we have people come in at 400, 600, 800.
And we know that, that they've got a lot of work to do.
Um, on the other hand, we have people that are at 6,000, 8,000, 10, 14,000, right?
Who have, are usually do a lot of cardio and also, uh, meditative work.
And by using the brain tap twice a day for just 11 minutes, we can build power.
(30:38):
in the autonomic nervous system, which is very cool.
They come back, they've done it for two months and my gosh, they've, you know, they'vegone from 800 to, you know, 3000 and it's like, this is good.
We're making progress.
Yeah, you should check that out.
interesting.
And I can find that when you have probably like you say that they measure 400 on thisparticular scale, that I see that people with a very low heart rate variability with a lot
(31:03):
of stress, it can take a long time to get back into some normal situation.
And it has taken a long time for them to get into that situation.
And they are often the ones who are easily frustrated.
who are often impatient and wants results right away.
And they need to change that mindset almost in the first place that this will take timeand you have to take one step at a time.
(31:33):
Yeah, I think that's right.
One of the things I like about the brain tap is that um even for people that um wouldstruggle to meditate, um can actually, it's like, it's like riding a bike with training
wheels.
It just, helps you get there.
Right.
And once you get there, once you felt that, once you felt that meditative state, it's likeriding a bike, you can get back to it.
But if you've never felt it, it's hard to know where you're trying to get to.
(31:55):
Right.
So we use it that way.
And then it's just a good, good training tool, quite honestly.
So, yeah.
Anyway, check it out.
Muse 2.
It's this kind neural feedback which you know you can listen to the sounds of the jungleand if you calm your mind the sounds will be calmer and so on using an EEG.
Right.
(32:15):
Yeah, that's yeah.
The neurofeedback is interesting too.
I've used those as well.
um I found that this one ah seems to work better for most people to just take them there.
Like we have everybody try it that comes into the office after we test them and meetpeople just like, my gosh, I love this.
Right.
Because for the first time they were just able to go into a theta state, let's say, orthat kind of thing.
(32:36):
Right.
So it's, it's very cool that way.
Yeah.
Well, cool.
What's on the horizon for you?
What's um
What are you excited about?
sun, sun, So I'm currently writing a book on sun exposure.
Been diving into it for sun exposure, sunlight photo, photo by modulation, but mostly fromthe sunlight.
(32:57):
So we have really been, and that is hard to understand how we could put people inside 95 %of the time and not even be looking for what we lose.
And of course, now we know that
The sunlight will create so much healthy, you know, things in our bodies with melatonin,with of course vitamin D, but also, uh you know, with nitric oxide, with the hormones
(33:29):
testosterone, the other sex hormones as well.
So there's so many benefits from sunlight that we have scared people away from for what itseems.
no reason.
It doesn't seem like the sun exposure is that connected to melanoma as we have beentaught.
(33:49):
So I'm still half a year away from publishing that book, but it's just an enormouslyinteresting subject.
And what's also interesting is that you can see it in the heart rate variability.
And it's almost funny because when Norwegians going from the north, people often go forone or two weeks.
sun vacation down to Spain or the Canary Islands or even the Caribbean and so on.
(34:14):
And their heart rate variability doubles and suddenly their symptoms go away.
So I think I was interested in that because I could see such a clear result on thevariables.
And it probably has something to do with with an nitric oxide with
(34:35):
that it goes into the cytochrome C oxidase in the electron transport chain, improving theATP production.
So there's so many things happening in the body.
that's...
It changes our mood also, right?
I mean, we just feel better.
We feel happier.
We feel more kind of alive than if we're kind of in the dark all the time, so to speak.
So yeah.
(34:56):
feel more energy.
And when you feel more energy is because you have more energy in my mind.
So many of the diseases that we are treating is really mitochondrial dysfunction thing.
The energy production is too low and there are so many things that can affect it.
That's right.
Yeah.
When we think about sunlight, we always think about really, if you had to pick one time aday to go out, would be in the morning before like, you know, nine 30 in the morning, at
(35:23):
least in this, in this latitude or 10 o'clock in the morning.
When you're getting the early morning sun, right.
It's stimulated melatonin production through your eyes and it's actually calming to yournervous system, kind of activating, ah you know, all the good things that happen with
hormone release and.
And you're not really exposing yourself to skin damage at that point in time, because Iskin damage from sunlight is real.
(35:47):
I mean, you you've seen people have been kind of torn up by it.
But um yeah.
So anyway, we love sunlight.
Well, that would be interesting book.
Hmm.
Yeah, that is really interesting.
And also when you see the morning light, because when I'm out running, I see all therunners, have sunglasses.
And then you lose a lot of that, that power from the sun, the regulation of the hormones,you know, in your, in your brain.
(36:13):
That's right.
That's right.
Well, very cool.
Well, Torkil it's been a pleasure chatting with you.
It sounds like you're doing some good work over there and check out the Brain Tap andmaybe next time I see you, you'll have another wearable around your head.
I don't know.
Who knows?
(36:34):
All right.
Thanks so much.
Thank you for having me.
Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
I'm your host, Dr.
Jeffrey Gladden.
And as always, we're here answering the big questions.
How good can you be?
How do you make 100 a new 30?
How do we live well beyond 120?
How do we live young for a lifetime?
And how do we develop a 300 year old mind?
And today I'm being joined by a physician, an emergency room physician, Dr.
(00:50):
Torkil Faero that's spelled T-O-R-K-I-L.
His last name is F-A-E-R-O.
And he's going to be coming to us from Norway, actually.
And he's very, very intrigued by heart rate variability, stress.
He's written a book on this that's become a bestseller and translated into a number ofdifferent languages.
(01:11):
And this becomes a very interesting conversation where we, talk about HRV, but we alsobranch out into lots of different permutations with regards to stress and health and ways
to counteract it.
And it's a really nice exchange of ideas.
think you're really going to enjoy this podcast.
Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
(01:34):
I'm your host, Dr.
Jeffrey Gladden, and I'm here with Torkil Faero who's Dr.
Torkil Faero, who's coming to us from the West coast of Northern Norway.
Right?
Is that, I get that right?
Yeah.
Okay.
I once got up to Bergen, which I thought was a long ways up there.
He said he's further North than that.
So I don't know.
(01:55):
He's somewhere up in the Arctic circle.
It almost sounds like we're starting to bump into it anyway.
ah
Well, welcome to the show, Dr.
Thank you Dr.
Jeffrey.
Nice to be here.
yeah, excellent.
So tell us a little bit about em your journey into being focused on heart rate variabilityand stress and things like that.
(02:17):
m You didn't start off that way.
Of course, you were probably trained like most of us in more traditional ah forms ofmedicine, if you will.
But how did you navigate to that?
How did you migrate to that?
It's a bit of a long story, but I'm trained as a normal physician and knowing about allthe diseases, I still make my livelihood from treating patients the way that I'm expected
(02:43):
to be as a normal doctor.
But some 12 years ago, my father died at 73 and I was took a look at myself in the mirror.
I could see I started to look like my patients.
Mm-hmm.
And I started looking around to see how can I be more healthy so I can reach an age farbeyond 73.
(03:05):
And I understood that there was so much knowledge about this.
And I understood I had to change my life totally around starting exercising, starting tofocus on sleep, nutrition, know, stress management and all of these things that we never
learned much about in medical school.
So I kind of had to start.
my own private medical study 2.0 by myself in my free time.
(03:31):
And somewhere along here, I understood that the autonomic nervous system is such a vitalpart of staying healthy and that we now have heart rate variability as a measure of the
state of this autonomic nervous system.
So I just got intrigued by that.
For a couple of years, I used an ECG based monitor strapped to my chest.
(03:54):
until I realized that we actually have this biometric in the watches that almost, at leastin Norway, almost everybody already uses.
And so I just dove into that and wrote the book called The Pulse Cure, which has beentranslated into nine languages, just been a continuing bestseller in Norway and has
(04:17):
completely changed my life around from being a normal one-to-one doctor to becoming a
public speaker and the bestselling author and everything that comes with that.
So, I'm still absolutely using the numbers and results I get from my Garmin watch, from myAura Ring, from my Wootband.
(04:40):
To guide my under these stressful circumstances, keep my head above water and still beproductive and keeping my health.
that's yeah, that's great.
So let me ask you this when you were uh when you were young, were you uh an athlete?
I kind of have this image that everybody in Norway is either cross country skiing or doingsomething.
(05:04):
So.
Yes, I was.
So I uh actually was on the national team in kayaking, in canoeing, maybe it's called inthe States.
uh Also doing of course, cross country skiing and other sports as well.
uh for like five years, was, uh you know, athlete training every single day, being all theway focused on that.
(05:29):
And that made it kind of strange that I just let myself
I don't know for like many years, not doing any exercise or taking any care about my ownhealth.
When did you step away from exercise?
Do you think?
I just, when I understood that I'm not going to be a world champion or come in theOlympics, I just quit.
(05:52):
I just focused my attention anywhere else.
was doing, because I've been, I've been traveling.
So I've been mainly focused on traveling, doing adventures, both alone and with my family,traveling around the world.
We have been sailing halfway around the world for years.
So my focus was on that.
I didn't really care about my own health through the medical study.
(06:13):
I didn't.
have much...
I think we thought that if I did everything right, I may live four or five years longer.
May.
Maybe.
And of course, doing that would require sleeping more, exercising a lot, uh doing thecooking from a lot more cooking.
(06:38):
And that would take four to five years.
during a lifetime to do that.
So I thought that, you know, the gains are not much more than the effort.
So why bother?
You may not even get that reward at the end.
But now, of course, studying these subjects, I understand that you can have a couple ofdecades more.
(07:01):
And now that I've been a doctor for 26 years, I can also see that in the patients that ifyou do most of the things wrong,
then you'd be lucky to get into your seventies.
If you do everything right, you have a fair chance of reaching your nineties and stillbeing vital and having a good life.
(07:24):
So that's what I'm aiming for.
And that's what I'm trying to help people understand themselves.
And of course, now that we have these watches, we have hard drive variability to guide us.
It's so much easier to manage, to be able to...
judge how the sleep quality is, the nutrition quality, if we are actually resting when wethought we were, and these kinds of things.
(07:48):
So I think that's part of the success in Norway that has been helping people towardstaking control of their own health.
So tell me about your dad.
Your father passed away at a fairly young age, at 73 I believe you said.
What caught up to him?
Was that lifestyle choice?
Did he end up with a disease or what?
(08:10):
so he got cancer, gallbladder cancer, which is like most cancers that we now know relatedto our lifestyles.
In my medical school, we were taught that it was genetic or just pure accident.
And now, of course, we know that the lifestyle has so much to say.
(08:30):
And my father just had a normal lifestyle.
didn't exercise too much, you know, the indoor life that most people have these days.
know Americans live indoors, you know, 95 % of the time.
He was probably sleeping and eating normally, but it's now normal to get these kinds ofdiseases.
So it wasn't, it wasn't directly unhealthy in any way, but he wasn't healthy either, youknow, with a, with, you know, know, 30 pounds overweight or so, and I was 40 pounds
(09:01):
overweight.
So a normal standard European, Western, US way of life is not healthy.
So you have to take more effort, put some more effort into it than that.
You know, one of the big one of the big drivers of of aging and also cancer risk isinsulin resistance.
(09:24):
And um as you know, when people are carrying extra weight around, um they have a muchhigher chance of being insulin resistant.
In the clinic over here, we're basically doing two hour glucose tolerance tests withinsulin curves on everybody that comes through.
um And the reason is because we found that so many people um
(09:46):
that have a hemoglobin A1c in the US terms of, 5.2 or 5.3 or something like that.
And fasting blood sugar of, you know, 90 or 93 or whatever.
When we stress them with 75 grams of glucose, it's just remarkable what happens.
Like their fasting insulin could even be five, let's say.
(10:07):
Ideally, we'd like it at two, but let's say it's five.
Their blood sugar might go up to 185 at one hour.
Their insulin might go up to
70, which it shouldn't go up more than say five times.
So if it's five, maybe 25 would be considered normal.
We'd like to keep that one hour number less than 130, 135.
(10:29):
And so people who are not obese, maybe carry a little bit of abdominal fat.
and exercise on a regular basis can still have significant insulin resistance when they'reeating or exposed to sugar, so to speak.
it's really, uh it's fairly insidious is my point.
(10:51):
There are the people that are obviously not the picture of health.
And then even in people that are the picture of health, so to speak, or close to it,there's kind of hidden risks there as well.
So it is interesting.
that I think we need to be a lot more vigilant in terms of how we care for the people.
(11:13):
Another thing we do is measure all the toxic burden in individuals.
We just had a 38-year-old woman here who was diagnosed with breast cancer on an MRI scanthat she got.
She just went out and got a full body MRI scan, found stage one breast cancer, three youngchildren, 38 years old.
um Why does she get that?
No genetic predisposition, no family history.
(11:35):
She's full of mold.
my gosh, full of toxins, environmental toxins.
And so it's really, um, if you're listening to this, the point is that, um, even thoughyou're exercising, eating well, things like that, there are other levels of this that need
to be looked at.
Like, what is your metabolic status?
Do you have insulin resistance?
What is the toxic burden?
(11:56):
What's the quality of the air and the water that you're breathing?
Things like that, because that stuff can, um, can really sneak up on any of us quitehonestly.
So.
Yeah, anyway, just to highlight that maybe data and some.
yeah, my father was of course advised to eat fat free diet.
(12:16):
You know, that was the advice from us doctors.
And I took a test myself and I found that I was pre-diabetic and used a CGM then and thenmanaged to, yeah, and managed to change what I was eating and how I was eating the
sequence of what I'm eating and so on.
(12:39):
So now I have a good ACA you won't see, absolutely.
And it's interesting also with the breast cancer that even if you have the BRCA1 gene,then if you're sleeping enough, you avoid getting the cancer.
If you don't sleep enough, for example, the chances of contracting a breast cancer is uhlarger with the same genetic background.
(13:03):
Yeah, I think that's really good insight.
know, the bracket gene, really the problem with it is it's a diminished ability to repairyour DNA is kind of what it boils down to.
And so most of the repair processes in the body occurred during slow wave sleep, deepsleep.
And to your point, you can, even if you have genetic predispositions that you know of orfamily history, ensuring that you get good quality sleep, which is back to your comments
(13:29):
about the wearables can help give you some insight.
So, you know, when you were talking about the whoop, the aura ring and the garment, you'reactually wearing the audience can't see us, but he's wearing all three of these.
Right.
So he's he's kind of a walking billboard for um for wearables, if you will.
I'm just curious, what's the correlation that you find between wearing all three of them?
(13:49):
Do you find that they uh contradict each other or correlate quite well?
They correlate well, they may stress different kinds of metrics in their reports.
So they would show your health from a little different standpoint, so to speak.
They would have some pros and cons.
(14:12):
I would say Garmin is by far the best when it comes to micromanaging your stress levels,you know, hour by hour, minute by minute, if you want that.
Mm-hmm.
more precise.
It probably has kind of a bigger engine, so to speak.
While the Auraring would be smaller, easier for many people who would not like a screen,who may just need to change their lifestyle a bit.
(14:40):
It would be better in regarding sleep, for example.
While the Bootpad would be better when you're writing a morning report every morning.
or you don't write it, but you check some different things you have been doing the daybefore.
And you will get a weekly and monthly report.
And I think that whoop is probably better when it comes to artificial intelligence andcollecting data and conveying that data to the person.
(15:09):
So they will all be different.
So I've been using maybe 10 or 15 different variables and I keep sticking to these three.
uh
Nice.
Garmin being by far the best one and also of course use them because to show that I'maffiliated with one of them and that I'm not have my integrity so to speak.
(15:33):
Sure.
Right.
So, you know, there are a number of things that we've noticed with the wearables.
And one is that if you drink alcohol, it really has an impact on sleep quality and slowwave sleep.
Of course, I think a lot of people feel like they will drink alcohol to relax and thatthey'll get sleepy and fall asleep.
(15:54):
The interesting thing is that, of course, and you know this from from wearing it andseeing patients, I'm sure that it really disrupts sleep in a big way, which
gets back to this idea of repair and recovery, right?
And one of the things I enjoyed about the whoop when I was wearing it was that therecovery score would give me an idea of not only the strain score when I was out mountain
(16:16):
biking or something, but it would give me the recovery score, which I would then utilizeto give myself an idea of what level of exercise I should engage in on this particular
day.
Is this a day to go all out or is it a day to kind of do a recovery kind of protocol?
I think there's a lot of wisdom in that too, because I think people can get focused on, umI'm going to exercise every day and they're trying to hit a personal record almost every
(16:41):
day.
And it's really counterproductive.
I think it's really about trying to match your exercise intensity to the quality of yourrecovery.
And if you kind of marry those two up, then that becomes a sustainable kind of way toexercise.
Absolutely.
And when I was training, you know, for the national team, we were going all in every day,you know, to the maximum every day.
(17:05):
And of course, now we know that it's when you recover that you build yourself stronger.
So if you push yourself to the max every day, you're just, you know, wearing yourselfdown.
You're not allowing your body to build itself stronger.
And this is why whoop and whoop has this, as you say, you can measure the strain and youwill see how recovered you are.
And if these, you know,
(17:27):
metrics are matching.
I think particularly also for women with their menstrual cycle, when they see that theweek before menstruation, they have so much less physiological power to do the exercise.
So I think particularly for those uh women is really, really important because it comes asa surprise, just as the surprise with alcohol that it really, because
(17:56):
I used to drink two glasses of wine every day, believing it used to be the doctor'sadvice, right?
And I even felt calmer.
So even after a busy shift at the ER, would, before I went to bed, I would have twoglasses of wine to, to wind down thinking it was useful, right?
And according to whoop, you know, that, that collects the data from the users, alcohol isthe worst dresser of all.
(18:23):
And I don't think I've met.
anyone starting to use a variable that has not cut down on their alcohol consumption.
we don't really, we're really poor at judging the consequences of the different things wedo.
We're not equipped to do that, but the heart rate will demonstrate just like the needle onyour speedometer, the intensity that is put upon you or you put upon yourself or from
(18:53):
from mold or alcohol or other factors.
Yeah, I think, I think that's a really wise statement that you just made, which is that,um, you know, we can be well intended, but, um, we don't really understand the
consequences of what we're doing, even if we think we're doing something healthy, likeexercise, like getting sunlight, like, um, having a glass of wine, like, you know,
(19:16):
whatever it might be, even eating certain foods, you know, are not healthy for everyindividual, right?
It's really.
It's about getting the foods that are right for your system, right?
Right for your gut, your bio, your immune system, these kinds of things, right?
So if you're listening to this, it really does become a custom fit and you want to havethe ability to tease that out.
(19:38):
You know, what is it that you're doing to optimize your ah autonomic nervous system?
I'm making sure I sleep enough.
That's number one, that I get those seven to eight hours of high quality sleep.
That will often mean, by the way, that I stop eating maybe four hours before I go to bed.
(20:01):
That is what also most people find.
And then I'm having a restricted feeding window, maybe six to eight hours.
And the rest of the time I don't eat.
I've cut alcohol.
more or less totally.
think I drink maybe 10 drinks a year just to reconfirm that I shouldn't do it.
(20:22):
I exercise, been running today, uh running maybe three times a week, also doing somestrength training.
I ran the New York marathon last year and the only training with light training, I onlytrain for 30 minutes in the zone two, twice a week, just to see if
(20:44):
Can I run a marathon with that background?
And I hadn't run earlier, so I was training for a year for that.
I'm making sure that I have a good stress balance that I'm able to calm myself down withbreath work mostly.
Can also do with a cold shower, cold exposure.
(21:06):
I also use a lot, of course, mostly during the winter.
Yeah.
And with nutrition, I stay away from food with chili that I react very, very strongly to.
had no idea before I started with the variables.
I also tolerate milk and gluten poorly.
What's that?
(21:28):
Chili, chili.
Yeah.
Like chili peppers.
That they put in everything without noticing because there's people are not allergic toit.
So they don't have to put it on the allergy list.
So you have to ask, you know, and as long as I eat it in the, if I eat it for lunch, it'sokay.
(21:49):
But if I eat it for dinner, it will ruin my night almost as bad as alcohol.
Interesting, interesting.
Yeah, that's very, that's very interesting.
The beauty of this is that if you're wearing these is you get lots of insight.
And when you start to combine it with a CGM and you can watch what your glucose is doing,that's a, that's a really powerful combination.
(22:10):
Uh, I think so, even if you're not diabetic, I would almost encourage everybody listeningto get a CGM and wear it for six weeks or eight weeks.
You'll learn so much about which foods and in which sequence you eat them.
what the impact is on your blood sugar.
And unfortunately, we don't have a CGM that can actually measure insulin.
(22:33):
I wish we did because the insulin really goes unnoticed.
And we've seen people that control their blood sugars beautifully with a two-hour glucosetolerance test, but my gosh, their insulin levels go super high.
And so it's another form of milder insulin resistance, if you will.
So there's just a ton of information there if we can.
(22:54):
if we can get that.
Yeah.
And then you, for example, you find that pizza is like the worst of all, when you getthose curves after a late night pizza, that will go for like seven hours bouncing up and
down.
And then you can also see on your wearable monitor that your stress levels follow thatsequence quite a lot.
(23:15):
right.
Yeah.
One of the insights that I had a while ago was that, um, you know, we think of, well,there was some interesting data in a study that basically showed that people that eat one
meal a day, uh, versus people that eat three meals a day or two meals a day, they had an80 % increase, risk of cardiovascular events and death if they one meal a day.
(23:35):
And the question was, why is that if intermittent fasting is good, why would, why wouldn'tone meal a day be good?
Cause I've gone to
meetings, and people will sort of almost braggadociously say, you know, I only eat onemeal a day.
It's like, really?
Okay.
So, um, but I think what you're highlighting and, what we sort of figured out as well isthat eating is actually stressful.
(24:00):
It's metabolically stressful.
We think it's a sort of, you know, regenerative or even rejuvenating, uh, restorative, butin many respects, it's actually very stressful.
And particularly if you get the wrong foods, the chili peppers, the gluten, the, know, uh,dairy things like that.
So if we're going to, when we're counseling people to eat, if they're going to eat in asix hour, eight hour window, whatever they want to do, we have them eat four or five meals
(24:27):
in that, in that space so that they're never getting that big metabolic load, allowingtheir body to adapt to it.
Uh, and, and, um, anyway, that's, that's one thing that we've kind of adopted over hereanyway.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
And so many people, struggle with symptoms from their intestines.
They have pain, bloating.
(24:48):
And when they get that long time without the eating, a lot of them get better.
That's right.
Yeah.
We've become big fans of the five day fast mimicking diet in that, in that regard to kindof reset the gut.
So.
m
then you can see on your wearable that it's actually relaxing for your system.
(25:10):
For many people at least.
And we used to think that...
And that was a surprise to me the first time I skipped breakfast, I was, you know, feelinghungry, expecting to see stress on my monitor.
I saw just calm.
Yeah.
So when you're fasting, you get these both calm and adrenaline.
(25:31):
So it's an interesting also to watch what happens to your body and to be able to monitorit.
Yeah, that is interesting.
um One of the things I've started doing recently is taking spermidine uh in the morningwhen I'm fasting because spermidine as you know, well, actually spermidine is a beautiful
molecule in that it addresses almost every hallmark of aging on some level.
(25:54):
But of course it really uh enhances autophagy.
And so if you're going to be fasting and you're going to be standing on the AMPK side ofthe
MTOR AMPK teeter totter, which is, you know, the regenerative side, the restorative side.
We're dropping in spermidine on that side of it to kind of enhance that as well.
So you can start to, what's that?
(26:18):
Too bad it's so expensive.
Yeah, well, uh getting sick is expensive.
That's thing, that's expensive.
I know, I know.
And you can also, as you're fasting, when you exercise while fasting, you can increaseyour autophagy as well.
That's another way you can do it.
That's right.
I take spermadine again, then go exercise.
So yeah, all good.
(26:40):
Yeah, very interesting.
So it sounds like you've developed some breath work practices.
Do you do any actual meditation per se?
you tapped into that or is it predominantly breath work or how are you?
breath work.
I think I'm kind of a meditative person.
I don't have a stress problem.
So I don't feel the need often to do so much meditation.
(27:06):
For me, it's often enough just to watch nature, to be outside walking, to go running.
But for people who are stressed, know, and many people are, you know, emotionallystressed.
then I know it's a good way to calm down.
And what's interesting also when you have the wearable, particularly the Garmin, then whenyou can see how your heart rate reacts.
(27:30):
So for many people, when they are meditating, they actually become more stressed, whichdoes not mean that they shouldn't do it, but maybe they really need to do it, you know,
when it's so stressful for them.
But at least it's interesting to know that what you did that you thought you could checkout as calming down.
was not calm.
(27:51):
It actually stressed you in some way.
a good point.
That's a good point.
you're, um if you're trying to meditate and you're kind of caught in this space of, umdon't think I'm doing it right, but I'm trying, you know, that can be stressful, of
course, right?
Meditation is really um more about simply being present and not being attached toanything, um outcomes or whatever else, right?
(28:16):
So it's really, it's kind of almost like, only a sacred space ah in many respects, butit's also just a very
quiet, calm, sort of stepping out of the flow of life going by kind of space, which isultimately very calming if you can get there, but trying to get there, I suppose, can be
stressful.
We use a device here called BrainTap.
(28:36):
I'm not sure if you've heard of that, but it's uh
it's a kind of muse.
I use the muse too, which is kind of neurofeedback.
yeah.
Muses neurofeedback.
This is actually utilizing a binaural beats uh with either music or just binaural beats inconjunction with photo bio modulation.
So you have lights coming through your eyes and through the blood vessels in the ears.
(28:59):
And you can actually pick which way form you want to go into.
So you can go to theta, which is a deep meditation.
You can put yourself in alpha.
You can go to gamma for flow.
You can put yourself in Delta to help you fall asleep.
We find that it, uh, that it's a very healthy tool for people.
here also where we measure vagal nerve power on everybody that comes into the clinic,every time they come in, we can actually measure the power, inside the autonomic nervous
(29:26):
system and the higher power you have.
What's that?
We do it with a, it's a, it's a computerized program that runs, uh, along with the braintap.
It's called neuro check and, uh
It's a few thousand dollars for the computer, but you just put clips on somebody's wristand they sit there for five minutes and you uh get a lot of things that are read out.
(29:49):
uh But one of the things is uh you can look at the, not only the balance inside theautonomic nervous system, but you can look at the power.
And what we find is that the people that have more power in the autonomic nervous systemare able to control their state much better.
So um we have people that come in.
Uh, normal power would be like, let's say 2,500 to 4,500 within the units that are beingmeasured.
(30:15):
And we have people come in at 400, 600, 800.
And we know that, that they've got a lot of work to do.
Um, on the other hand, we have people that are at 6,000, 8,000, 10, 14,000, right?
Who have, are usually do a lot of cardio and also, uh, meditative work.
And by using the brain tap twice a day for just 11 minutes, we can build power.
(30:38):
in the autonomic nervous system, which is very cool.
They come back, they've done it for two months and my gosh, they've, you know, they'vegone from 800 to, you know, 3000 and it's like, this is good.
We're making progress.
Yeah, you should check that out.
interesting.
And I can find that when you have probably like you say that they measure 400 on thisparticular scale, that I see that people with a very low heart rate variability with a lot
(31:03):
of stress, it can take a long time to get back into some normal situation.
And it has taken a long time for them to get into that situation.
And they are often the ones who are easily frustrated.
who are often impatient and wants results right away.
And they need to change that mindset almost in the first place that this will take timeand you have to take one step at a time.
(31:33):
Yeah, I think that's right.
One of the things I like about the brain tap is that um even for people that um wouldstruggle to meditate, um can actually, it's like, it's like riding a bike with training
wheels.
It just, helps you get there.
Right.
And once you get there, once you felt that, once you felt that meditative state, it's likeriding a bike, you can get back to it.
But if you've never felt it, it's hard to know where you're trying to get to.
(31:55):
Right.
So we use it that way.
And then it's just a good, good training tool, quite honestly.
So, yeah.
Anyway, check it out.
Muse 2.
It's this kind neural feedback which you know you can listen to the sounds of the jungleand if you calm your mind the sounds will be calmer and so on using an EEG.
Right.
(32:15):
Yeah, that's yeah.
The neurofeedback is interesting too.
I've used those as well.
um I found that this one ah seems to work better for most people to just take them there.
Like we have everybody try it that comes into the office after we test them and meetpeople just like, my gosh, I love this.
Right.
Because for the first time they were just able to go into a theta state, let's say, orthat kind of thing.
(32:36):
Right.
So it's, it's very cool that way.
Yeah.
Well, cool.
What's on the horizon for you?
What's um
What are you excited about?
sun, sun, So I'm currently writing a book on sun exposure.
Been diving into it for sun exposure, sunlight photo, photo by modulation, but mostly fromthe sunlight.
(32:57):
So we have really been, and that is hard to understand how we could put people inside 95 %of the time and not even be looking for what we lose.
And of course, now we know that
The sunlight will create so much healthy, you know, things in our bodies with melatonin,with of course vitamin D, but also, uh you know, with nitric oxide, with the hormones
(33:29):
testosterone, the other sex hormones as well.
So there's so many benefits from sunlight that we have scared people away from for what itseems.
no reason.
It doesn't seem like the sun exposure is that connected to melanoma as we have beentaught.
(33:49):
So I'm still half a year away from publishing that book, but it's just an enormouslyinteresting subject.
And what's also interesting is that you can see it in the heart rate variability.
And it's almost funny because when Norwegians going from the north, people often go forone or two weeks.
sun vacation down to Spain or the Canary Islands or even the Caribbean and so on.
(34:14):
And their heart rate variability doubles and suddenly their symptoms go away.
So I think I was interested in that because I could see such a clear result on thevariables.
And it probably has something to do with with an nitric oxide with
(34:35):
that it goes into the cytochrome C oxidase in the electron transport chain, improving theATP production.
So there's so many things happening in the body.
that's...
It changes our mood also, right?
I mean, we just feel better.
We feel happier.
We feel more kind of alive than if we're kind of in the dark all the time, so to speak.
So yeah.
(34:56):
feel more energy.
And when you feel more energy is because you have more energy in my mind.
So many of the diseases that we are treating is really mitochondrial dysfunction thing.
The energy production is too low and there are so many things that can affect it.
That's right.
Yeah.
When we think about sunlight, we always think about really, if you had to pick one time aday to go out, would be in the morning before like, you know, nine 30 in the morning, at
(35:23):
least in this, in this latitude or 10 o'clock in the morning.
When you're getting the early morning sun, right.
It's stimulated melatonin production through your eyes and it's actually calming to yournervous system, kind of activating, ah you know, all the good things that happen with
hormone release and.
And you're not really exposing yourself to skin damage at that point in time, because Iskin damage from sunlight is real.
(35:47):
I mean, you you've seen people have been kind of torn up by it.
But um yeah.
So anyway, we love sunlight.
Well, that would be interesting book.
Hmm.
Yeah, that is really interesting.
And also when you see the morning light, because when I'm out running, I see all therunners, have sunglasses.
And then you lose a lot of that, that power from the sun, the regulation of the hormones,you know, in your, in your brain.
(36:13):
That's right.
That's right.
Well, very cool.
Well, Torkil it's been a pleasure chatting with you.
It sounds like you're doing some good work over there and check out the Brain Tap andmaybe next time I see you, you'll have another wearable around your head.
I don't know.
Who knows?
(36:34):
All right.
Thanks so much.
Thank you for having me.
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